that lets you jump high about 5 to 6
meters and land safely at its core is
the yet to be invented surge battery
which provides short bursts of
high-intensity current to drive those
high-speed propellers this is one of
those ideas I had a design of mine I
mean it surely does look fascinating but
there are a lot of question marks around
it I think will take about ten years
before you can get one of these ideas
ideas ideas ideas worth spreading that’s
what reads below the Ted logo which
notifies that you know what some ideas
are not worth spreading some ideas are
just dumped and I’m not talking about
the Batman snuggie and the pet rock
because those sold millions people
millions those are two brilliant ideas
right there I’m talking about legit
engineering or business ideas that will
never see the light of day we all have a
lot of them especially us engineers at
MIT have too many of them piles of ideas
that will be forgotten coming from
academia I can tell you that only about
ten percent of the ideas will be
published in the form of a paper only
one percent will be patented and only
about point one percent will actually
become a business and impact the world
now these are rough numbers but if you
ask any academic or innovator he or she
will probably answer the same this means
that only one in a thousand ideas can do
actually some good out there which is an
insanely low yield I mean it takes about
10 to 15 years to come up with a
thousand ideas or publish a hundred
papers even in top schools so why is
this happening why is it that ninety
percent of the ideas go nowhere well you
may say because some ideas are just dumb
remember the Batman snuggie and the pet
rock
which is a fair answer but in fact a
very subjective one these two examples
actually show that an idea that might be
considered useless and ridiculous from
one’s perspective can actually be
interesting and successful from others
perspective Plus even if half of these
ideas were not working and just plain
wrong you still have forty-five percent
of good ideas that for some reason won’t
make it out there you want to know why
because we don’t put them out there they
stay with us we don’t communicate them
the problem is not just with the ideas
but also with us inventors we tend to
abandon our ideas because we don’t have
enough confidence or immediate interest
in them or we tend to possess them and
lock them up because we think there are
two precious and there’s no other
options really academic publications are
too time-consuming and extremely narrow
for these types of ideas and patenting
is too expensive so I turn to online
platforms and tried using blogs and
YouTube and TEDx talks but none of them
work as efficiently as I wanted them to
all of these platforms requires a lot of
production at all of lights and cameras
and all these people behind the scene
editing to convey a single idea this
lengthy production puts a lot of
pressure on the ID ater so I was losing
hope on this I have a busy job I mean I
have to do actual research and I
couldn’t afford to spend this much time
on each idea until one night as I was
going through my older ideas thick
sketchbooks I saw this design from 1999
it was an apparatus that was supposed to
let me see my gameboy color screen in 3d
through stereo vision this was basically
my first version of virtual reality
headset at the age of 16 which by the
way wouldn’t work because there was no
parallax in the scene but the fact that
I could look at this one picture and
understand an idea from 17 years ago
just hit me I was like hmm a picture is
worth a thousand words what if it could
fit
every idea into one picture one
beautiful comprehensive sketch that says
it all sounded like a great idea I
immediately started to build up my
sketching skills over the weekends
thanks to online tutorials i went from
something like this to something like
this in about a year then i started to
get connected to other concept artists
online and discover this amazing
platform called computer graphics
society or cg society this is an online
platforms that allows million self
concept artists around the world to
share their illustrations with each
other in high resolutions this is a
great website for artistic studies it’s
full of cool pictures of aliens and
robots but there’s not much science
going on here really and that’s exactly
what i want to change together with cg
society we basically want to bring the
brains of MIT to the hands of marvel
studio artists how cool is that the
result is what we call the imaginarium
of technology a place where engineering
ideas can come to life and inspire this
platform allows you to match up with an
artist so you can either upload your
idea in the form of an illustration or
you can describe it an artist to have it
Illustrated the ideas are tagged and
organized into this gallery of sketches
as you can see here so these are my
ideas for example and if you’re
interested in any of them can just click
on it and learn more about it or you can
start a conversation with the creator of
the idea some of these ideas are
published online immediately the others
are cherry picked by a panel of artists
and scientists from Marvel Studios and
MIT these selected ideas are then
showcased in events such as this one or
MIT members week where there are a lot
of companies present this gives these
poor ideas the chance to reach the right
people each idea has a unique ID so who
is interested can directly contact the
creator and endorse the idea based on a
mutual agreement so far we have had
three idea exhibitions on topics such as
autonomous cars and virtual reality and
these idea exhibitions have been
received amazingly well because pictures
are powerful and they can go even beyond
the language barrier yes if you’re a
company with IP sensitive materials or
if you have a conflict of interest then
this might not be the right platform for
you but if you’re a creative individual
trying to impact the world by
resurrecting some of your ideas let me
assure you that this is the best place
to put those ideas into some use ok I’ve
been talking about 10 minutes now to
convey to you one idea of the
imaginarium of Technology in the tell
format now I will take one minute to
give you two ideas in the form of two
pictures two pictures that can make an
impact and potentially save lives this
is to show you how powerful the art and
science can be hand in hand are you
ready for this this is the infinity
ladder it’s a rollable ladder that is
stretched out but it’s by a set of
drones so the drones fly up to the wall
and lashed to the top of the wall and
then you can climb up the stretched out
ladder the tagline reads no balls can
ever stop humans again simple
engineering people here’s the centimeter
sized robotic pill that stays in your
stomach and is charged wirelessly some
future is predicted we will have Mike
robot injected hope to our bloodstream
but being an engineer I think that’s
far-fetched I think this is more
practical solution for merging with
machines or whatever that is so these
robots filter out the excessive toxins
and things like fat and sugar that is in
your diet so in the future you can feel
less guilty when bite into your burger
the tagline reads every diet is perfect
I think someone somewhere should work on
these ideas but I cannot suddenly Qui
my job and start falling all of these
random ideas I think you get the point
now I want to thank everyone who jumped
on board with me and made this possible
this is really a call to my fellow
scientists and artists don’t let your
ideas die don’t just draw a random
monsters and aliens let us come together
and communicate something at the peak of
intellectual value something that is
both beautiful and functional let us
take a second look at ideas not worth spreading thank you